“The fact is we have weakened unions and workers have less leverage,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a non-profit group that analyses the economic impact of policy policies on lower-income Americans, told Salon. “Labor’s share of private-sector income looks like it’s coming back a little bit, but it’s still far below where it could be at this point in the recovery.” Gould points mainly to the opportunities squandered by Congress to implement more stimulus spending measures, such as investing on public school teachers (there are fewer now than before the Great Recession) and much-needed public-works projects. The opportunities were squandered even as record-low interest rates would have made these jobs project cheaper.

Casey referenced a 2015 study published by the Economic Policy Institute that said wages consistently grew with the rise in productivity starting from the end of World War II until 1973. Since then, wages stagnated as productivity continued to increase, creating a lot of frustration for American workers. “If you’re at the end of 40 years with 11 percent wage growth, you’re going to have a lot of anxiety because people’s economic security is really at stake,” said Casey. “Then, they see the dysfunction in Washington, a government shutdown, arguments over the debt ceiling and whether or not we should pay the bills. When you combine those, you can see where people have a lot of anxiety.”

What is the correct figure for how much women are paid relative to men? Is it 80 cents to the dollar? Or is it 83 cents? The answer, it turns out, is both: There are alternative methods for measuring the gender wage gap, and a Wednesday panel discussion at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., focused on the myriad ways the gap shortchanges female workers. The event centered on a new EPI report entitled “What is the gender pay gap and is it real?” “Different gender wage gaps are answers to different questions,” said EPI senior economist Elise Gould, a co-author of the report, during the discussion. “It doesn’t mean [the wage gap] is not real.” While 80 cents to the dollar reflects the median discrepancy for women working full-time, Gould said that EPI uses the 83 percent figure because it looks at per-hour wages and includes part-time workers.

Some argue that the U.S. is basically at “full employment” now, which economists consider the lowest rate of joblessness that doesn’t cause price inflation ― although they don’t agree what the rate should be. So what accounts for the persistence of very-long-term unemployment when the official jobless rate has been hanging around a comparatively healthy 5 percent for a whole year? Maybe it’s a clue that full employment is more elusive than it seems. “We’re still probably a year away” from full employment, said Elise Gould, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute. She said more months of steady job growth will eventually lead to jobs for those who’ve been looking the longest, a group that can face discrimination in hiring. “As jobs continue to increase and the labor market tightens, those workers are going to be pulled in along with everyone else,” Gould said.

For every dollar men make, women make 83 cents, and progress toward closing it has largely stalled in recent years. If there’s good news, it’s that the gap has closed considerably since 1979, when women made 62 cents for every dollar earned by a man, according to a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute. Unfortunately, one reason the spread has narrowed is not because women are earning more, although they are, but because men are making less. According to the EPI’s analysis of US government wage data, men’s inflation adjusted hourly wages have fallen 6.7% since 1979, even as women’s have increased 24%.

Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute said that stripping out the volatile inventory components of GDP suggests the economy is growing at a more modest pace than the third-quarter data indicates. Still, economists believe the rebound raises the odds that the Federal Reserve will hike interest rates later this year.

The US does outperform most of the world in one area: the parity of educational attainment between men and women. In that category, it shares the #1 spot with a several other countries, including two of the most gender-equal in the world: Iceland and Finland. But that doesn’t translate to equality in the labor force, given that US women earn $0.83 for every dollar men earn. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, however, rising inequality overall has kept everyone’s wages down in the US. “Closing only the gap between men’s and women’s wages threatens to ensure parity in this stagnation, not parity in progress,” says Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI, a Washington think tank, in a press release. “To achieve true progress, the gender wage gap must be closed alongside the gap between economy-wide productivity and the wages of most workers.”

Well this area is not alone. The Economic Policy Institute says 3.2 million jobs left the US for China between 2001 and 2013. The lead author, Robert Scott, is working on follow up research, and he’s certain the numbers have only grown, with manufacturing and construction hardest hit. “Those are the two sectors that pay really well for those kinds of workers. The jobs that we have gained have been in services, such as retail trade, restaurants and home health care, where wages are much lower – on average about 30% lower in total compensation. So what’s happening is we’re trading in good jobs for bad,” Mr Scott said… Robert Scott argues that currency manipulation is the single biggest factor. He says China has kept its currency artificially low for years, which makes its exports cheaper overseas – acting as a massive subsidy for its own manufacturers.

When economist Elise Gould and a colleague published a report on the wage gap back in July—”‘Women’s work’ and the gender pay gap”—the obligatory trolls rose up from the comment section. “We got comments back—and I’m not saying they’re high-level comments—sort of denying that it actually exists,” Gould told me over the phone. It’s not just random misogynistic trolls who find objections with wage gap statistics, either. It’s common party line from conservatives and libertarians who just don’t think there needs to be any intervention in the way employers conduct their businesses—and from Republicans in Congress continue who to block the Paycheck Fairness Act. These critics commonly say that women are paid around 80 cents for every dollar men make not because of gender discrimination but because of choice: Women choose to work in lower paying fields, women choose not to ask for raises, and women choose to work shorter hours than men.

In the last several decades, executive pay has risen dramatically compared to pay for typical workers. In 1989, CEOs made about 59 times what the average worker pulled in. In 2015, they made 276 times what a typical worker makes ― about $15 million on average, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.

The level of religious activity in a state can have a significant effect on the wage gap between men and women in that state, according to a report released by the Economic Policy Institute last week. Utah, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana — among the most religious states, according to a Gallup poll conducted earlier this year — have some of the highest gender pay-gaps in the US… “When you live in an area that has a bigger focus on religion and traditional gender roles, sometimes there can be biases in place where girls are pushed to pursue the humanities, and boys are taught to pursue math and science,” Elise Gould, the report’s principal author, told Business Insider.

Part of the reason the upward climb has stretched on for so long is just that the low-point—the recession—was so low. From the nadir of the Great Recession, employment took longer to hit its pre-recession peak than it did during any of the last three economic recoveries: 11 months after the recession of the early 1980s, 23 months after the one in the 1990s, 39 months in the early aughts, and a lengthy 51 months following the Great Recession, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

“The idea that he has an obvious lever to get us to anywhere close to that, I don’t see it,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “It’s not economically literate.”… But the economies of India and China are significantly different than the United States. Both are emerging economies, and have ample room for improvement as they train up their workforce and take advantage of productivity developments from across the world. “They have a lot of reasons why they can hit very fast productivity growth rates,” Bivens said. “The fact that they’re growing fast is totally a function of the fact that they’re starting at a much lower level.”

The U.S. and developing economies such as China and India have major structural differences that lead to the differences in GDP growth that Trump mentioned. Economists with viewpoints as diverse as Trump’s adviser Peter Navarro, Heritage Foundation fellow Salim Furth and left-leaning researcher Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute all agree on this core point…Bivens said the U.S. economy is unlikely to grow at a faster annual rate than 2.5 percent over the long run, given existing trends. This would still be faster than growth projections in other major economies such as Germany and Japan, he noted…There isn’t unanimous agreement that Trump’s plan would lead to the type of long-term, sustained growth that Navarro has predicted. Bivens said any reform to tax or trade policy could precipitate a small spike in growth, but the uptick would not be long-lasting. “If we did some policy maneuver to reduce our trade deficit, we’d get a year or two of a percentage point faster growth, and then we’d converge again onto our long-run trend,” Bivens said.

This morning, a new study was released by the Economic Policy Institute that detailed new findings about the gender pay gap. The research was done in an effort to disprove the surprising number of people who don’t actually believe that the gender pay gap is real. (It’s real.) The authors of the report write that a “typical, or median” woman working full-time gets 80 cents for every dollar that a man makes. This is why they say there can be variables to that number.

“The Fed should perhaps hold off on an interest-rate increase because the groups that benefit most late in a recovery are just now starting to see those gains materialize,” said Valerie Wilson, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute think tank. “We need to allow these types of gains to continue as long as possible so people can experience a full recovery.”

Take what’s called the prime age employment rate. It’s a very simple measure, telling us how many 25- to 54-year-olds have jobs. But over time it has proved to be an extremely accurate indicator. And it suggests that Massachusetts has made up for all the losses of the Great Recession. Right now, 81.1 percent of 25- to 54-year-olds have jobs, according to calculations from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on the needs of low- and middle-income workers. In 2007, before the financial crisis, it was 81.2 percen

According to the Economic Policy Institute: “In line with the Department of Labor, our estimates suggest that between 694,000 and 1,053,000 employees of federal contractors may directly benefit from additional paid sick leave, including an estimated 450,000 to 775,000 who currently receive no paid sick leave.”

The gender pay gap is one of those issues that sparks debate, not the least of which is whether it even exists. To those deniers, economists have an answer: The data clearly show that women are paid less than men for doing the same work, even after controlling for issues such as education and experience. One of the reasons why some may debate its existence is that the gap can be measured in different ways, although the results consistently show depressed earnings for women, according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

A major research report out Thursday from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) aims to inform the national discussion about workplace policies with a new analysis showing the gender wage gap is real. “We’re basically saying we’ve measured it a lot of different ways, and it exists, and it’s real, and unfortunately it has not gone away,” said Elise Gould, an economist with the nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank EPI, in a phone interview with Rewire. Drawing on national and regional surveys of pay, occupational categories, and educational attainment, the report drills down on different aspects of the gender wage gap to measure it across race, education, work experience, and other factors. Among the key takeaways: Unequal pay hits women of color the hardest, and the “motherhood penalty” is real. Mothers earn roughly 4.6 percent less per hour than women who are not mothers, even after controlling for education and experience.

Let’s start with the job market. This has been another brutal year in which to graduate. Research from the Economic Policy Institute finds that young college graduates’ underemployment rate is nearly a third higher today than it was in 2007. Everyone is looking for an edge.

A 2015 GOBankingRates.com survey of 5,000 Americans found that more than half of those surveyed had less than $1,000 in a savings account. This amount doesn’t factor in retirement or other accounts, though other studies show many people aren’t putting away enough for retirement either. A 2016 analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute based on data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances showed that retirement savings have stagnated over time.

Comparing what Americans want in retirement with what reality holds is a sad — if not devastating — exercise. A March 2016 Economic Policy Institute report finds the median retirement account balance for people who have any savings at all is $60,000 — meaning half of people have more than $60,000 and the rest have less. But that’s literally only half the story, because nearly 50 percent of Americans don’t have a penny saved for retirement. If you include all those people, the median retirement savings plummets to just $5,000.

A closer analysis of 401(k) participants by race and/or ethnicity finds troubling low rates of coverage among the Hispanic population. However, it represents a prime opportunity for 401(k) advisors involved with niche and diversity marketing to help. “Hispanic workers lag far behind other workers in retirement plan participation,” according to Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute. “In 2012, just 34 percent of Hispanic workers employed 35 or more hours per week were enrolled in an employer-based plan, compared with 59 percent of their non-Hispanic white counterparts.”

App users felt it now takes a total of 151 workers’ salaries to make as much as a CEO, but it should only take a total of 72. The actual figure? A total of 303 workers’ salaries, according to a 2015 report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

When it comes to hourly wages, white men earn an average of $21 an hour, compared to $15 an hour for black men and $14 an hour for Latino men. (White and Asian women actually earn more per hour, on average—$17 an hour and $18 an hour, respectively—than black and Latino men.) Further, a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, showed that in 2015, after controlling for education, region, and work experience, black men earned 22 percent less than white men working in the same occupations, a disparity that has worsened in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Informed progressive observers will recognize many of the letter’s signatories, starting with Stephanie Kelton, a University of Missouri-Kansas City economist who has been a top adviser to Sanders. Among the other notables are Economic Policy Institute President Larry Mishel, who was beating the drums about wage stagnation before it was fashionable; Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, an early advocate for treating free trade more skeptically; and Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez, who is among the world’s most influential experts on inequality.

Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, told Bloomberg BNA that when he meets with Clinton’s transition team, “I would be enthusiastic about” Su for U.S. labor secretary. NELP and EPI have both helped frame labor policies in Democratic administrations, and two former EPI employees are on Clinton’s transition team.

Wages are 3 percent lower in right-to-work states than other states, after accounting for differences in the cost of living, demographics and labor-market characteristics, according to an April 2015 study by the Economic Policy Institute. That translates to $1,558 a year less in earnings for a typical full-time worker.

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EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.